Festus · Scene 20 (2/2) (4/5)

| Helen | Of death! is that all? Well, I too have had, What every one hath once, at least, in life⁠— A vision of the region of the dead; It was the land of shadows: yea, the land Itself was but a shadow, and the race Which seemed therein were voices, forms of forms, And echoes of themselves. And there was nought, Of substance seemed, save one thing in the midst, A great red sepulchre⁠—a granite grave; And at the bottom lay a skeleton, From whose decaying jaws the shades were born; Making its only sign of life, its dying Continually. Some were bright, some dark. Those that were bright, went upwards heavenly. They which were dark, grew darker and remained. A land of change, yet did the half things nothing That I could see; but passed stilly on, Taking no note of other, mate or child; For all had lost their love when they put off The beauty of the body. And as I Looked on, the grave before me backed away; And I began to dream it was a dream; And I rushed after it: when the earth quaked, Opened and shut, like the eye of one in fits; It shut to with a shout. The grave was gone. And in the stead there stood a gleedlike throne, Which all the shadows shook to see, and swooned; For fiends were standing, loaded with long chains, The links whereof were fire, waiting the word To bind and cast the shadows into hell; For Death the second sat upon that throne, Which set on fire the air not to be breathed. And as he lifted up his arm to speak, Fear preyed upon all souls, like fire on paper, And mine among the rest, and I awoke. | | Student | By Hades, ’twas most awful. | | Festus | And when love Merges in creature-worship, let us mind: We know not what it is we love: perhaps It is incarnate evil. In the time It takes to turn a leaf, we are in Heaven; Making our way among the wheeling worlds, Millions of suns, half infinite each, and space For ever shone into, for ever dark, As God is, to and by created mind, Upheld by the companion spirit. There The nature of the all in one, and whence Evil; the fixed impossibility Of creatures’ perfectness, until made one With God; and the necessity of ill As yet, are things all touched upon and proven. The next scene shows us hell, in the mad mock Of mortal revelry⁠—the quelling truth That all life’s sinful follies run to hell; That lies, debauches, murders never die, But live in hell forever; make, are hell. And truth is there too. Hell is its own moral. Perdition certain to the unrepentant; Redemption on a like scale with creation; And all creation needing it and having. What follows is of earth, and setteth forth God’s mercy, and the mystery of sin; And a great gathering of the worlds round God, Told by the youth to his truthful, trustful, love; Who, light and lowly as a little glow-worm, Sheddeth her beauty round her like a rose Sweet smelling dew upon the ground it grows on. And then a rest in light, as though ’tween earth And Heaven there were a mediate spirit point, A bright effect original of God, Enlightening all ways, inwardly and round. Then comes a scene of passion, brought about By the bad spirit’s means for his own ends, Whom we know not when come, so dark we grow; Making it but a blind for the next scene, Laid by the lonely seashore, as before, Where the great waves come in frothed, like a horse Put to his heart-burst speed, sobbing up hill, Wherein he works his victim’s death, to clear His way, and keep his name of murderer; As he in other parts makes good his titles, Deceiver, liar, tempter, and accuser; Hater of man, and, most of all, of God. In the next scene we picture back our life, Contrasting the pure joys of earlier years, With the unsatedness of current sin; And the sad feel that love’s own heart turns sick Like a bad pearl; but that the feeling still Is adamantine, though the splendid thing Whereon it writes its record, is of all Frailest; and though earth shows to good and bad, The same blind kindness, beautiful to see, Wherewith our lovely mother loveth us, The world in vain unbosometh her beauty, We have no lust to live; for things may be Corrupted into beauty; and that love, Where all the passions blend, as hues in white, Tires at the last, as day would, if all day And no night. So despair of heart increases. The last lure⁠—power⁠—is proffered, taken. All Hangs on the last desire, whatever it be. A scene of prescient solitude and soul Commune with heaven, repentance, prayer, faith, Which are all things inspired alone of God, Who signifies salvation, follows this. In the next scene, we feel the end draw nigh. A change is wrought on earth as great as that In its first ages, when the elements Less gross and palpable than air, were changed To mountainous and adamantine mass, Now ’neath the feet of nations;⁠—figuring forth The fateful mind which is to govern all, Controlling the great evil; for it is mind Which shall rule and be ruled, and not the body, In the last age of human sway on earth;⁠— Ambition ruined by its own success; Aims lost, power useless: love, pure love, the last Of mortal things that nestles in the heart. There is a love which acts to death, and through death, And may come white, and bright and pure, like paper, From refuse, or from clearest things at first; It is beyond the accidents of life. For things we make no compt of, have in them The seeds of life, use, beauty, like the cores Of apples that we fling away;⁠—nought now Is left but trust in God, who tries the heart And saves it, at the last, from its own ruin⁠— The parting spirit fluttering like a flag, Half from its earthy staff. The death-change comes. Death is another life. We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight Another golden chamber of the king’s, Larger than this we leave, and lovelier. And then in shadowy glimpses, disconnect, The story, flower like, closes thus its leaves. The will of God is all in all. He makes, Destroys, remakes, for His own pleasure, all. After inferior nature is subdued, The evil is confined. All elements Conglobe themselves from chaos, purified. The rebegotten world is born again. The body and the soul cease; spirit lives: And gloriously falsified are all Earth’s caverned prophecies of bodyhood. Spirits rise up and rule and link with Heaven;⁠— The soul state is searched into; dormant Death, Evil, and all the dark gods of the heart, And the idolatrous passions, ruined, chained, And worshipless, are seen; and there, the Word, Heard and obeyed;⁠—next comes the truth divine, Redintergrative; Evil’s last and worst, Endeavour, vanquished⁠—by Almighty good. The last scene shows the final doom of earth, Soul’s judgment, and salvation of the youth, As was fore-fixed on from and in the first: The universe expurgated of evil, And hell for aye abolished; all create, Redeemed, their God all love, themselves all bliss. We may say that the sun is dead and gone For ever; and may swear he will rise no more; The skies may put on mourning for their God, And earth heap ashes on her head: but who Shall keep the sun back, when he thinks to rise? Where is the chain shall bind him? Where the cell Shall hold him? Hell, he would burn down to embers; And would lift up the world with a lever of light Out of his way: yet, know ye, ’twere thrice less To do thrice this, than keep the soul from God. O’er earth, and cloud, and sky, and star, and Heaven, It dwells with God uprisen as a prayer. The spirit speaks of God in Heaven’s own tongue, No mystery to those who love, but learned, As is our mother tongue, om Him, the parent; By whom created, fashioned, flesh and spirit, All forms and feelings of all kinds of beauty Are burned into our heart-clay, pattern like. Much too is writ, elsewhere and here, not yet, Made clear, nor can be till earth come of age; Like the unfinished rudiments of light Which gather time by time into a star. Thus have I shown the meaning of the book, And the most truthful likeness of a mind, Which hath as yet been limned; the mind of youth In strengths and failings, in its overcomings, And in its short comings; the kingly ends, The universalizing heart of youth; Its love of power, heed not how had, although With surety of self-ruin at the end. Every thing urged against it proves its truth And faithfulness to nature. Some cried out ’Twas inconsistent; so ’twas meant to be. Such is the very stamp of youth and nature; And the continual losing sight of its aims, And the desertion of its most expressed And dearest rules and objects, this is youth. | | Student | I look on life as keeping me from God, Stars, Heaven, and angels’ bosoms. I lay ill; And the dark hot blood, throbbing through and through me; They bled me and I swooned; and as I died, Or seemed to die, a soft, sweet sadness fell With a voluptuous weakness, on my soul, That made me feel all happy. But my heart Would live, and rose, and wrestled with the soul, Which stretched its wings and strained its strength in vain, Twining around it as a snake an eagle. My eyes unclosed again, and I looked up, And saw the sweet blue twilight, and one star, One only star, in Heaven; and then I wished That I had died and gone to it; and straight Was glad I lived again, lo love once more. And so our souls turn round upon themselves Like orbs upon their axles: what was night Is day; what day, night. God will guide us on, Body and soul, through life and death, to judgment. | | Festus | Earth hath her deserts mixed with fruitful plains; The word of God is barren in some parts; A rose is not all flower, but hath much Which is of lower beauty, yet like needful; And he who in great makings doth like these, Doth only that which is most natural. Like life too it is boundlessly unequal, Now soaring, and now grovelling: at one time All harmony, and then again all harshness, With an ever-changing style of thought and speech. The work is still consistent with itself: As one part often bears upon another, Lifting it to the light, where most it needs. The thoughts we have of men are bold as men; Our thoughts of God are thin and fleet as ghosts; But it was not his meaning to draw men, Such as he heard they were in the old world And sometimes mixed with; he blessed God he knew But little of the world, that little good; While some sighed out that little was its all. So for the persons and the scenes he drew, Oft in a dim and dreamy imagery Shapen, half-shapen, mis-shapen, unshapen, They are the shadowy creatures which youth dreams Live in the world embodied, but are not, Save in the mind’s, which is the mightier one. They are the names of things which we believe in, Ideas not embodied, alas, not! And the sad fate which many of those meet Whom the youth loves and quits, means nought so ill As the betrayer’s sin, salvationless Almost: it is but desertion, not betrayal; And forced on him according to a promise, Made at the first unto him, and to be Wrought out in brief time; and the same fair souls Saved, stand for our desires made pure in Heaven. Let us work out our natures; we can do No wrong in them, they are divine, eterne: I follow my attraction, and obey Nature, as earth does, circling round her source Of life and light, and keeping true in Heaven, Though not perfect in round, which nothing is. ’Twas the heart-book of love, well nigh all grief. For the heart leaves its likeness best in that Overwhelming sorrow which burns up and buries, Like to the eloquent impression left In lava, of Pompeian maiden’s bosom. All passions, and all pleasures, and all powers Of man’s heart, are brought in, and mind and frame. He made this work the business of his life; It was his mission; and was laid on him. He was a labourer on the ways of God, And had his hire in peace and power to work. He wrote it not in the contempt of rule, And not in hate; but in the self made rule That there was none to him, but to himself He was his sole rule, and had right to be. The faults are faults of nature, and prove art Man’s nature, that a thing of art, like it, Should be so pure in kind. | | Helen | I do believe The world is a forged thing, and hath not got The die of God upon it. It will not pass In Heaven, I tell ye. | | Student | How shouldst thou know aught Of Heaven, unless by contrast? | | Festus | Pray now cease; Ye two are jarring ever, though as with The bickering beauty of two swords, whose strife, Though deadly, maketh music, I could listen, Did not each stab, whichever way, pain me. | | Helen | Oh, I could stand and rend myself with rage To think I am so weak, that all are so; Mere minims in the music made from us⁠— While I would be a hand to sweep from end To end, from infinite to infinite, The world’s great chord. The beautiful of old Had but to say some god had been with them, And their worst fault was hallowed to their best deed. That was to live. Could we uproot the past, Which grows and throws its chilling shade o’er us, Lengthening every hour and darkening it; Or could we plant the future where we would, And make it flourish, that, too, were to live. But it is not more true that what is, is, Than that what is not, is not. It is enough To bear the ever present, as we do. The city of the past is laid in ruins; Its echo-echoing walls at a whisper fall: The coming is not yet built; nor as yet Its deep foundations laid; but seems, at once, Like the air city, goodly and well watered, Which the dry wind doth dream of on the sands Where he dies away with his wanderings: While we enjoy the hope thereof, and perish; Not seeing that the desert present is Our end. | | Festus | The brightest natures oft have darkest End, as fire smoke. | | Student | I will read the book in the hope Of learning somewhat from it. | | Festus | Thou may’st learn A hearty thanksgiving for blessings here, And proud prediction of a state to come, Of love, and life, and power unlimited; And uttered in a sound and homely tongue, Fit to be used by all who think while speaking. With here and there some old, hard uncouth words Which have withal a quaint and meaning richness, As stones make more the power of the soil. The world hath said its say for and against; And after praise and blame cometh the truth. Living men look on all who live askance. Were he a cold grey ghost, he would have honour; And though as man he must have mixed with men, Yet the true bard doth make himself ghost-like; He lives apart from men; he wakes and walks By nights; he puts himself into the world Above him; and he is what but few see. He knows, too, to the old hid treasure, truth; And the world wonders, shortly, how some one Hath come so rich of soul; it little dreams Of the poor ghost that made him. Yet he comes To none save of his own blood, and lets pass Many a generation till his like Turns up; moreover, this same genius Comes, ghost-like, to those only who are lonely In life and in desire; never to crowds: And it can make its way through every thing, And is never happy till it tells its secret; But pale and pressed down with the inward weight Of unborn works, it sickens nigh to death, Often; but who like happy at a birth? | | Student | Say what a poet ought to do and be. | | Festus | Though it may scarce become me, knowing little, Yet what I have thought out upon that theme, And deem true, I will tell thee. |